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Windows 7: Why is my OS installation so large relative to sum of files?

I performed a fresh install of Windows 7 on a SSD. Added a bunch of apps, and moved some of the user folders onto a data drive.

Used space on the SSD shows as 65GB
Sum of files and folders (with operating system files unhidden): 51.5GB

1. What accounts for this difference? It's not the hibernation file or paging file because I can see those.
2. I can see hiberfil.sys is taking up 12.5GB. If I don't want to use hibernation, can I get rid of this?

Yes you can turn off the hiber file, how much is the page file ? How much is system restore taking up ?

It should only be taking up 20 GBs, depending on page file, hiberfile, system restore etc.

Was this a new ssd ? A clean install to a formatted partition or un allocated space ?

Post a shot of disk management if you like, fully expanded.

Yes, new SSD. Clean install to formatted NTFS partition that takes up most of the SSD (have a small partition for Linux).

hiberfil.sys = 12.5 GB
pagefile.sys = 16.6 GB
system restore looks like it's currently taking up 15 GB (which I suppose answers my original question as to the difference between sum of files/folders and total disk space occupied)

I have plenty of space on this OS partition, it's 200 GB. Just want to make sure it's optimized for performance, as Windows started switching to the basic color scheme, which is very odd because I'm barely running anything. On an immediately prior build on this system (with OS partition on HDD), I could run many apps simultaneously along with dozens of browser windows before having Windows switch to basic color scheme and disable Aero.

With 20 GB for windows and everything else you list, it comes up right.

Yep, it sure does. Thanks for helping me figure out what was going on there.

Quote: Originally Posted by AddRAM

Turn off the page file, you don`t need it.
Turn off the hiberfile if you don`t use it.
Turn off system restore if you don`t want to use it, make disk images instead.

Re calculate the space used.

I'm not worried about the space, as I have plenty of it on the OS partition. More interested in performance.

When I noticed Windows was turning off Aero and switching to basic color scheme, I was very surprised, so I started looking around and that's when I noticed how massive the OS had become. But now I get it.

Still not sure why performance dropped so much temporarily. I wasn't running much and have 16GB of RAM, with >10gb of free ram. So there was some other resource constraint, just not sure what it was.

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